We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and ca

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. --David Hume The longer I live the more I find interrogating any so-called rational position always leads down (ultimately) to some underlying feeling, that fundamentality rationality serves (at best) as an evolved means by which to better obtain the objects of those impulses and (at worst perhaps, though no less out of evolutionary necessity -- and perhaps expressly because of the possibility of self-examination opened up by the technical ability of the metacognition of the latter) alternatively act as an aesthetic veneer over those impulses.